LinkedIn Ad Strategy: Benchmarks and Tips

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LinkedIn is a dynamic hub for B2B marketing leaders, enabling them to unlock access to a highly targeted, professional audience.

However, advertising on the platform requires a strategic approach that goes beyond ad placement. To truly excel, advertisers need to understand the platform's best-practices.

This article will delve into LinkedIn advertising benchmarks that hold the potential to steer your campaigns toward resounding success.

1. Optimal Audience Size and Target Facets

A critical aspect of LinkedIn advertising is defining your target audience, starting with audience size. The minimum audience size is 300 LinkedIn members; however, LinkedIn recommends an ideal range of 50,000-300,000 to drive results.

Audience size can also vary by campaign type:

Sponsored content and sponsored messaging campaigns: 300,000+ audience members
Text ad campaigns: 60,000-400,000 LinkedIn members

Those recommendations ensure a balance between reach and specificity, maximizing the potential for engagement. However, each campaign is unique, and testing is critical to finding the audience size that works best.

When creating your audience, consider using a minimum of three target facets that align with your campaign goals. Those could include job title, industry, company size, and seniority level. Consider your campaign's message and employ your buyer personas to select the targeting criteria that will resonate best.

2. Diversified and Pre-Tested Creative Units

Variety is the key to unlocking the full potential of LinkedIn advertising. To elevate the effectiveness of your campaigns, run six or more creative units per campaign. That not only facilitates A/B-testing but also increases ad rotation, leading to enhanced ad frequency. As a result, you can potentially reduce costs per click and cost per impression and even lower the cost per lead.

When testing ad variations, set up ad rotation to ensure that each variation of your ad is showing evenly. If your campaign is set to optimize for performance, LinkedIn will serve the highest-performing ad variation to more people versus giving the others a chance to pick up steam. Enabling ad rotation will give an accurate assessment of the test, and help you select the ad variation that resonates with your target audience.

Once the campaign is live, keep an eye on the average clickthrough rate (CTR) as a good indicator of when it's time to refresh the ad's content. When the CTR starts to decline, it's time to introduce new ad text or images. LinkedIn recommends refreshing ad content at least once per month to prevent a decline in performance.

3. Strategic Budget Allocation

Experienced advertisers understand the significance of budget allocation in their campaigns. To maximize outcomes, consider adopting these daily budget benchmarks:

$50 or higher per campaign for awareness objectives
$50 or higher for consideration objectives
$100 or more for conversion-focused campaigns

Also, employing maximum delivery or lifetime budgets for awareness and consideration campaigns can give you a competitive edge during the bidding process, securing prime ad placements.

4. Patience and Duration

Rome wasn't built in a day, and the same principle applies to LinkedIn advertising. For accurate results and insights, it's recommended to run your campaigns for 30 days or more, allowing for sufficient data accumulation to assess performance and make informed optimizations. That could involve refining audience targeting, modifying ad creatives, adjusting bid strategies, or fine-tuning the allocation of your budget.

5. Harnessing Website Demographics

LinkedIn's Website Demographics tool provides valuable demographic information about visitors to your website. By installing the insight tag and collecting data from at least 300 visits, you will learn more about your website's audience, enabling more refined targeting for your campaigns. Plus, harvesting that data can be useful for future campaigns, such as retargeting.

6. A Completed LinkedIn Company Page

A completed LinkedIn company page holds immense potential. Completed pages garner 30% more traffic than incomplete ones. Furthermore, 36.2% of experienced advertisers maintain company pages that are complete and consistently active.

To make the most of your company page...

Include a logo and banner that reflects your brand guidelines. The recommended specs for the logo are 400 (w) x 400 (h) pixels and, the recommended dimensions for a cover image are 1,128 (w) x 191 (h).
Ensure all relevant information regarding your company is filled out, including categories, such as industry, company size, description, location, and website URL. As you create your company page, a meter will indicate progress. When all sections are complete, the meter will disappear. Aim to get the meter as close to completion as possible to create the best possible experience for potential followers.
Use the "About" section of the page to articulate your company's values and mission to establish a connection with your audience.

7. Consistent Engagement Strategies

Consistency is essential to keeping your audience engaged and attracting new followers. Posting daily on your LinkedIn company page drives activity, enhances interactions, and expands your follower base.

Beyond posting regularly, incorporating relevant hashtags relating to your products or solutions can significantly increase the visibility of your content.

Another way to drive engagement is to prompt audience participation. Encourage feedback from your audience by asking questions or encouraging opinions with LinkedIn polls.

Most important, offer value when presenting a call to action to the audience. Offer an article, whitepaper, infographic, free trial, product demo, or e-book in exchange for interacting with your ad or post. If audience members can gain something from interacting with your company, they will be more likely to engage.

8. Tap Into Groups and Connections

Engagement isn't limited to your company page alone. Engaging with LinkedIn groups of interest can help you organically expand your following and funnel activity back to your business page.

The Invite Connections feature lets you extend personal connections to your business page, strengthening your presence.

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Unlocking the full potential of LinkedIn advertising requires a comprehensive approach that encompasses audience targeting, creative diversity, strategic budgeting, and consistent engagement. By adhering to the benchmarks and best-practices in this article, you will position your campaigns for success and harness the true power of the LinkedIn platform.